March 27th, 2025 by WCBC Radio

West Virginia is among just ten states whose prison population declined between 2019 and 2023, according to a new report from the Prison Policy Initiative. Wanda Bertram with the initiative says that during 2022 and 2023, state prisons added more than fifty thousand people, undoing about a 25-percent decrease in incarceration sparked by the pandemic, and the nation’s total number of incarcerated people has jumped by two percent…

   

"That's an actually significant jump in size, although it's just 2%. The data suggests that there are more people in state prisons, local jails and federal prisons than there were a year ago."